Published: July 23, 2008 12:04 pm            

Pastor authors second book

A dilemma facing most church leaders is how to help people integrate Sunday morning’s teaching into everyday life during the rest of the week. The Rev. Glenn McDonald, senior pastor of Zionsville Presbyterian Church, has used his 30 years of experience as a church leader to create a guide to help.

His new book, “Living Beyond the Sanctuary: Discipleship in the Real World,” serves that purpose by focusing on what he believes are the two greatest lessons from Jesus: to love God and to love others.

“When Jesus was asked ‘what is the greatest commandment’, he said, ‘love God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength’, and then he said ‘love your neighbor as yourself,’” McDonald explained.

In his book, McDonald outlines three spiritual practices he calls “Godward.” He urges readers to surrender to God as their true center, learn to pay attention to God in a culture fixated on distractions, and keep daily company with God through prayer.

“When Jesus comes and says that He’s a King, (Americans) don’t want to take that seriously,” McDonald said. “We’d rather that He’s a personal trainer, or a consultant, or a coach and we can fire Him if we don’t like what He’s doing.”

McDonald also outlines three spiritual practices to help love those around you. He writes that people should widen their circles of acceptance and love, live from the inside out, and embrace the challenge of living each second in God’s kingdom.

“Almost universally, when someone gets excited about their faith, they gradually start cutting off the number of people they used to hang with, and they mostly hang around with other Christians,” he said. “And we form these ‘spiritual ghettos’ where we’re no longer out there shoulder-to-shoulder with people who are very rough and raw and very angry and far from God.”

He urges readers, rather, to spread God’s word and recognize there are people around the world who need His teachings.

Benefiting from the context of working in the church for three decades, McDonald said a major theme that sticks out more than anything else is striving for the fullest possible commitment to the spiritual life.

“The title is somewhat self-interpreting,” McDonald said. “The ‘sanctuary’ meaning that if you put in an hour or two on Sunday, it’ll take care of anything else. No, it won’t. There has to be an intentional approach to spiritual life every day, and every hour. This is an invitation to be the way that Jesus was all about, and frankly we’ve just been negligent about it.”

McDonald said this book has been growing inside him for the past 15 years, and writing it has helped him become a better Christian.

“The book essentially is a conversation I’m having with myself, with God, and with other people,” he said. “The process of writing is an extended conversation that goes on inside me, and now it goes on with other people who are reading the book. In that sense, I get to live it in a way that wasn’t truly there before I wrote it.”

This is Glenn McDonald’s second book; in 2007 he published “The Disciple-Making Church,” which helps church leaders understand the importance of making disciples rather than simply attending to the “ABCs”: attendance, buildings and cash that so many churches find themselves concentrating on today.

        

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